Provocative, science-based, and practical, "Evolution Rx" presents a new and powerful way of understanding the human body based on evolutionary medicine.

Evolutionary change is usually incremental and continuous, but some increases in organizational complexity have been radical and divisive. Evolutionary biologists, who refer to such events as “major transitions”, have not always appreciated that these advances were novel forms of pairwise commitment that subjugated previously independent agents. Inclusive fitness theory convincingly explains cooperation and conflict in societies of animals and free-living cells, but to deserve its eminent status it should also capture how major transitions originated: from prokaryote cells to eukaryote cells, via differentiated multicellularity, to colonies with specialized queen and worker castes. As yet, no attempt has been made to apply inclusive fitness principles to the origins of these events. Domains and Major Transitions of Social Evolution develops the idea that major evolutionary transitions involved new levels of informational closure that moved beyond looser partnerships. Early neo-Darwinians understood this principle, but later social gradient thinking obscured the discontinuity of life's fundamental organizational transitions. The author argues that the major transitions required maximal kinship in simple ancestors - not conflict reduction in already elaborate societies. Reviewing more than a century of literature, he makes testable predictions, proposing that open societies and closed organisms require very different inclusive fitness explanations. It appears that only human ancestors lived in societies that were already complex before our major cultural transition occurred. We should therefore not impose the trajectory of our own social history on the rest of nature. This thought-provoking text is suitable for graduate-level students taking courses in evolutionary biology, behavioural ecology, organismal developmental biology, and evolutionary genetics, as well as professional researchers in these fields. It will also appeal to a broader, interdisciplinary audience, including the social sciences and humanities.

This book presents selected contributions to the 19th Evolutionary Biology Meeting, which took place in September 2015 in Marseille. It consists of 22 chapters, which are grouped in four sections: · Convergent Evolution · Evolution of Complex Traits · Concepts · Methods The annual Evolutionary Biology Meetings in Marseille serve to gather leading evolutionary biologists and other scientists using evolutionary biology concepts, e.g for medical research, to promote the exchange of ideas and to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations. Offering an up-to-date overview of recent findings in the field of evolutionary biology, this book is an invaluable source of information for scientists, teachers and advanced students.

Recent advances in understanding the thermodynamics of macromolecules, the topological properties of gene networks, the organization and mutation capabilities of genomes, and the structure of populations make it possible to incorporate these key elements into a broader and deeply interdisciplinary view of molecular evolution. This book gives an account of such a new approach, through clear tutorial contributions by leading scientists.

All the tissues of the eye, including the lens, the cornea, the ciliary body, the neuroretina and the retinal pigment epithelium must work in harmony for the realization of clear vision.The phenotypic emergence of each of these tissues requires intercellular communication, which is achieved through direct physical contact as well as through diffusion and reception of the molecular beacons.This volume provides an overview of the molecular and cellular biology of eye development and encompasses themes like early gene expression in the surface ectoderm and the optic cup, retinal neurogenesis, signaling molecules and axonal guidance. It presents new findings on the influence of the lens on the development of the visual system and how gene expression in the optic cup controls differentiation of the lens fiber cell while established ideas about the morphogenesis of the ciliary body are challenged. A valuable source of information for developmental biologists and neurobiologists as well as ophthalmologists interested in understanding the relationship between temporally and spatially regulated gene activity and function and cellular interactions in early development and neuronal functions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2000, held in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA in October 2000. The 37 revised full papers presented together with three invited papers and eight industrial abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 140 submitted papers. The book offers topical sections on database integration, temporal and active database modeling, database and data warehouse design techniques, analysis patterns and ontologies, Web-based information systems, business process modeling, conceptual modeling and XML, engineering and multimedia application modeling, object-oriented modeling, applying object-oriented technology, quality in conceptual modeling, and application design using UML.

This book constitutes the refereed joint proceedings of seven workshops on evolutionary computing, EvoWorkshops 2007, held in Valencia, Spain in April 2007. It examines evolutionary computation in communications, networks, and connected systems; finance and economics; image analysis and signal processing; and transportation and logistics. Coverage also details evolutionary algorithms in stochastic and dynamic environments.

This book consists of five introductory contributions by leading mathematicians on the functional analytic treatment of evolutions equations. In particular the contributions deal with Markov semigroups, maximal L^p-regularity, optimal control problems for boundary and point control systems, parabolic moving boundary problems and parabolic nonautonomous evolution equations. The book is addressed to PhD students, young researchers and mathematicians doing research in one of the above topics.

This book gathers selected papers from the Chinese Materials Conference 2018 (CMC2018) held in Xiamen City, Fujian, China, on July 12–16, 2018. The Chinese Materials Conference (CMC) is the Chinese Materials Research Society’s most important conference series and has been held annually since the early 1990s. The 2018 edition consisted of 32 domestic symposia, 2 international symposia and 1 international materials forum. This proceedings book covers the fields of powder metallurgy, advanced aluminum alloys, advanced magnesium alloys, superalloys, metal matrix composites, space materials science and technology, as well as nanoporous metal materials, and presents recent original research findings from more than 300 research groups at various universities and research institutes.